Electric Car Owners Have 'Range Anxiety': Study

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Electric car owners are turning out to be more anxious about their car's limited range than is probably warranted. A new study from Aerovironment found that EV owners weren't willing to travel more than half the quoted range for a given vehicle, even though they said separately that they were confident the quoted range was accurate, according to AllCarsElectric.

The reason? While owners believe a car manufacturer when it says that a given vehicle can last, say, 100 miles on a charge, they'd rather drive just the 50 miles and leave the extra as a reserve capacity, and were unwilling to push the car to its limits, the report said.

With the EV used in the test--which had a range of 93 miles--some drivers refused to even go further than 10 miles away from a charger. Once researchers introduced a second charging station into the study, drivers felt much more comfortable, but still refused to travel more than half of the quoted range. The study concluded that prospective EV customers need a highly developed charging infrastructure to relieve range anxiety, according to the article--perhaps one station for every EV on the road, at least initially.